Today I have got a fantastic guest for you! He is the host of the “Real Estate Mogul” podcast and owns Ocean City Development, a real estate investment company based out of Boston. He’s purchased over 500 properties to fix ‘n flip, wholesale, and buy and hold in the past 5 years. Tom is considered one of the “masters of marketing” in the real estate investing space, and that’s what we’re going to talk about with him today.

Tom considers Facebook as one of the best marketing mediums out there. It knows everything about us and aggregates that data into one convenient platform. What that means for investors is that Facebook knows who owns a home or who is likely to purchase or sell a home in the future. Tom uses the Facebook ads program and its targeting system to get very specific and targeted leads.

As investors, we want to build our customer “Avatar”. We need to know what the characteristics are of the people likely to sell or buy in different markets, based on location and property type. A seller looking to sell their land will not have the same characteristics as the seller looking to sell an apartment building. Once you know your Avatar, you can simply enter those characteristics into Facebook and you’ll only get leads from people you WANT to reach.

If you don’t have a healthy advertising budget, at least $10,000, then Tom recommends you use free or cheaper advertising streams, like networking or bandit signs, to build that advertising reserve. Facebook takes time to learn what ads work and which ones don’t, and that time costs money every day.

One of the biggest things you can do for your business, according to Tom, is to get mentors and join mastermind groups. These are the best ways to shortcut the hardest processes of your business. You can definitely learn this stuff for free, but it could take YEARS to get that same quality that a high-level mastermind brings you.